TERMINAL GREENHOUSE CRISIS

A CRASH TECH PROGRAM Is NEEDED. It HAS TO INVOLVE HYDROGEN.

At the present rate of greenhouse gases emissions, within nine years, massively lethal climate and oceanic changes are guaranteed.

Such is the conclusion one should draw from the Inter Governmental Panel On Climate Change of the United Nation (the famous IPCC, with its top 300 climate scientists from all over the world). About 78% of the emissions have to do with heating, cooking, and basic, necessary industrial activities, such as making cement. They are not elective.

As Bad As An Asteroid?

Notes: CO2 FOLU = CO2 emissions from Forestry and Other Land Use. F-gases = Fluorinated gases covered under the Kyoto Protocol. On the right side of the figure: Emissions of each greenhouse gas with associated error bars (90% confidence interval).

Only a crash program of construction of several hundreds of new technology nuclear fission plants, an all-out renewable energy program, with massive solar plants all over the American South and the (similar latitude) Sahara desert, plus a massive hydrogen economy to store the wind and solar energy could possibly enable us to MITIGATE the massive lethal climate change which will come otherwise.

In other words, it is already too late to avoid massively lethal climate change.

What’s the problem? Simple mathematics. It’s evaluated that human activities in the last century or so released 515 billion tons of GreenHouse Gases (GHG). The IPCC and the best experts believe that 800 to 1,000 billion tons of such gases would bring a rise of global temperatures of two degrees Celsius.

At the present rate of emissions, that’s nine years to reach the upper reaches: one trillion tons of GHG.

Most of the temperature rise will be in the polar regions, melting those spectacularly, and inducing worldwide climate catastrophe, especially if emissions of polar methane turn apocalyptic. The polar regions are the Achilles heel of the Earth’s present biosphere. By striking there mostly, enormous changes can be brought to bear, as they would destroy the Earth’s air conditioning and oceanic circulation.

In 2014, trade winds in the Pacific had four times the energy they usually have, creating abnormally intense ocean upwelling off the west coast of North America, thus a high pressure ridge (thus a drought there), causing a world wide oscillation of the jet stream that dragged cold polar air down the east coast of the USA, before rebounding as continual storms and rain on the west coast of Europe, and so forth.

Nobody can say the weather was normal: precipitation in England beat all records, dating 250 years, whereas most of California experienced extreme drought.

At this point, warm water is piling down to 500 meters depth in the western Pacific in what looks like a preparation for a massive El Nino, similar to the one in 1997-98. If this happens, global temperature records will be smashed next year.

Massively lethal means death to the world as we know it, by a thousand cuts. It means cuts to democracy, privacy, life span, food intake. Some of these are already in plain sight: the Ukraine war is already a war about gas, no less an authority as dictator Putin says so.

Tom Friedman in “Go Ahead, Vladimir, Make My Day.” takes the situation lightly. “SO the latest news is that President Vladimir Putin of Russia has threatened to turn off gas supplies to Ukraine if Kiev doesn’t pay its overdue bill, and, by the way, Ukraine’s pipelines are the transit route for 15 percent of gas consumption for Europe. If I’m actually rooting for Putin to go ahead and shut off the gas, does that make me a bad guy?

Because that is what I’m rooting for, and I’d be happy to subsidize Ukraine through the pain. Because such an oil shock, though disruptive in the short run, could have the same long-term impact as the 1973 Arab oil embargo — only more so. That 1973 embargo led to the first auto mileage standards in America and propelled the solar, wind and energy efficiency industries. A Putin embargo today would be even more valuable because it would happen at a time when the solar, wind, natural gas and energy efficiency industries are all poised to take off and scale. So Vladimir, do us all a favor, get crazy, shut off the oil and gas to Ukraine and, even better, to all of Europe. Embargo! You’ll have a great day, and the rest of the planet will have a great century.”

It’s not so simple. The investments needed are massive, and all the massive investments so far have to do with fracking… Which is, ecologically speaking, a disaster. 3% methane leakage makes fracking worse than burning coal. And this leakage is apparently happening.

Unbelievably, some of the countries with coal beds got the bright idea to burn the coal underground. Australia, about the worst emitter of CO2 per capita, experimented with that. It had to be stopped, because some particularly toxic gases (such as toluene) were coming out, not just the CH4 and CO the apprentice sorcerers were looking for.

Carbon Capture and Storage does not exist (but for very special cases in half a dozen special locations, worldwide, not the thousands of locales needed). And CSS will not exist (profitably).

What technology exist that could be developed, but is not yet developed? Not just Thorium reactors. The hydrogen economy is a low key, and indispensable economy. Water can be broken by electricity from wind and sun, and then energy can be stored, under the form of hydrogen. Nothing else can do it: batteries are unable to store energy efficiently (and there is not enough Lithium to make trillions of Lithium batteries).

The hydrogen technology pretty much exist, including for efficient storage under safe form (one thick plate of a material that cannot be set aflame can store 600 liters of hydrogen).

Another advantage of storing hydrogen is that oxygen would be released when it is created. Although it may seem absurd to worry about this, too much acidity in the ocean (from absorption of CO2) could lead to phytoplankton die-off, and the removal of half of oxygen production.

In this increasingly weird world, that’s where we are at. Producing oxygen, water…

Oh, by the way, how to stop Putin? Europe should tell the dictator he can keep his gaz. Now. As good an occasion to start defending the planet, and not just against fascism.

At the present rate, we will be more than doubling the CO2 equivalent Green House Gases in the next nine years. This criminal madness is high treason against the biosphere itself. Including all of us, animals.

42 Responses to “TERMINAL GREENHOUSE CRISIS”

The real question relates to finance. Even if we had technology that would be able to be implemented immediately, we do not have the investment to implement it. Also, we cannot change everything. The vehicle fleet we have has to be powered. My personal view is that we have to go flat out on research to work out what is possible and what is not. Patrice says there is insufficient lithium to power electric vehicles, but people have been playing with a sodium/air battery, and if that could be made to work, there is no shortage of sodium. In one of my SF novels, I suggested for Mars fuel cells (batteries could work the same) run on aluminium/chlorine. OK, that was just fiction, but the multivalent ions in batteries are not very satisfactory because the ions complex with oxygen in the solvent, but they may not complex as much if there is no oxygen in the electrolyte.

I also think biofuels will be able to keep quite a lot of transport going, as well as supply considerable materials for polymers, BUT the most promising sources are from the sea, which is where negligible R&D dollars are being spent. I tend to be against hydrogen, largely because having worked with it, I am unhappy about letting the average unskilled person deal with it.

It’s 5:20am. I couldn’t sleep. Sat up in the dark, turned on my tablet computer and read your essay, Patrice. It’s an essay that needs to be widely promulgated and with your permission I shall do my little bit over at Learning from Dogs.

Other than that, I don’t know what to say! So much anguish in my head just now.

You are more than welcome to publish it in Learning from Dogs, Paul! From what you say, I indeed realize better that these facts ought to be more widely known and impact policy. Other than that, I am like you, I don’t know what to say. Business as usual is going to turn into a big “surprise”, and all the pundits will say: “Oh, nobody saw it coming!” ;-)!

Can you explain why so many of the pro-Russian protestors in Ukraine carry anti-Fascist signs? Is the EU seen as a fascist entity in Russia, or is it the new Ukranian government that is seen as Fascist? However you explain it, Putin – and Russians in general – seem to live in an Orwellian inversion of reality.

Hello Martin! Glad to see you here! The pro-Putin propaganda is extremely well organized. It’s similar to Nazi propaganda, back in the 1930s, and 1940s, just better. The bigger the lie, the more it’s swallowed, and goes down well, the better for fascist plutocrats. We are familiar with this in ecology: Ronald Reagan had already accused pine forests to create pollution!

The Nazis themselves, the real ones, spent quite a bit of time claiming they were socialists (!) and against “plutocrats” (this is real, I’m not kidding). Na-zi” National Socialist (pronounced Zocialist).

Putin is indeed trying to identify (Western) Europe with fascism. I know some UKIP people (say Chris Snuggs) who have become strangely silent, now that Putin is on a roll (as a tank).

As I wrote many times before, Putin does not want free elections in Ukraine on May 25. He, and his henchmen, will do and say whatever to prevent that, the betterment of their existences depend upon it. Hitler did the exact same in Spring 1938 in Austria. Last thing Hitler wanted was Austria allied to the French Republic and the UK.
See: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/1938/

So basically the rising fascism around and under Putin is not fundamentally different of what we have seen from climate deniers. Just, Putin and al have nukes.

Does that answer your questions? Putin and al. have studied Orwell well.
PA

{Essay above was kindly published by Paul Handover on Learning From Dogs; I sent the following comment, after it got no comments}

Thanks Paul for publishing my shot across the bow of complacency. I notice the ominous silence on the commentary front… That’s unfortunate, because I have lots of answers, and there should be lots of questions.

Thanks Paul for publishing my shot across the bow of complacency. I notice the ominous silence on the commentary front… That’s unfortunate, because I have lots of answers, and there should be lots of questions.

The entire USA electric production could come from covering one county in Texas with solar panels made with existing industrial technology (and twice the efficiency is reached in the lab, let alone PV making electricity at night from Infra Red). So is the USA’s CO2 crisis over?

Not really: one needs to transport and store the electricity. Batteries are hopeless.

So how to do this? HYDROGEN. RE electricity can be used to produce hydrogen that can be easily stored and transported (a plate of material impervious to a acetylene torch can contain 600 liters of compressed hydrogen).

Hydrogen can be used as gasoline is, and then reverse combined with oxygen from the air to make electricity in a fuel cell. All this technology exists, and just has to be mandated by law.

(After all, Obama gives plutocrats $7,500 per 100,000 Tesla Model S.)

So solar and wind can work, at least in the USA. Europe will have to conquer the Sahara first, before establishing giant power plants.

Thorium reactors is another solution. Harassed by its own pollution, China has a crash program for these, headed by the son of the last president (!) The first reactor should come on line next year.

Hi Robert! You are entirely right. Now multiply 13.5 Gt by 4. What do you get? About 54 BILLION TONS per year. This is what we are PRESENTLY emitting in Green House Gases CO2 equivalent. Just look at the IPCC graph carefully. It stops in 2010, but CO2 emissions have augmented considerably since (from China, Germany Energie Wende, switching to coal, and the USA fracking, and methane leaking).

The gt Carbon figure used by IPCC to assess progress toward the 2 C ECS mark doesn’t count the atomic weight in the gasses, just the weight of the carbon. That’s why the figure can be confusing at times. Using the same math, we’ve already emitted about 2060 gt CO2e into the atmosphere. But the number IPCC uses for its 2 C prediction (conservative) is the carbon portion which is about 515.

So one figure is, essentially, an apple and the other is an orange. Gt C = apple. Gt CO2e = orange. The annual emission is 13.5 gt C (the measure that IPCC uses to track potential ECS warming) or 54 gt CO2e.

Mann notes that all we need to lock in the 2 C figure is about 550 to 600 gt C or 2200 to 2600 gt CO2e. So we have three years under his assessment.

Under IPCC, which in my view is in for a rude awakening, we have about 20 when we factor in current rate of emissions increase (assuming about 530 gt C in 2014 as the IPCC figure is about two years old).

Look at it another way: with 500 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, we locked in one degree Celsius of GLOBAL warming (and around 5 degrees at the poles!). We are more than doubling that in the next nine years. Easily locking in another degree Celsius, GLOBAL (and probably much more, much sooner, as the oceanic temp rise has been relentless).

Dear Robert:
OK! I stayed silent for a few days, as I was doing other things and reviewing the numbers. I admit to be slightly confused myself. The exact numbers are very confusing. Only the graphs are clear and eloquent… Because they depend upon relative quantities, not the absolute one.

I confess I made the sin of confusing somewhere the “C” in “CO2” and “CO2”, and the IPCC, EPA, etc, are certainly culprit of the same sin. I even wonder if they don’t do it deliberately, to understate the problem.

Moreover what counts is the GHG (Green House Gases) CO2 equivalent… Not the soot (!!!!!!!!). Oh, when they speak of “Carbon”, they don’t measure that! (Although it comes in with a minus sign for the greenhouse effect!)

Now the real number is 6,000 billion tons of CO2 (half went into the ocean). Moreover, that has to be scaled up further, from the other GHGs… Including water vapor.

Doing all the math, one gets a sort of doubling of the catastrophe in ten years, rather than 40 (as a simple doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would lead one to think).

I should certainly make that explicit in a further essay, and I thank you for pointing out my apparent sleight of hand (which was not deliberate)…

As you said, the IPCC is in for a rude awakening… They will eat coal…
PA

(Phys.org) – A new genetic analysis revealing the previously unknown biodiversity and distribution of thousands of fungi in North America might also reveal a previously underappreciated
Apparently, fungi emit ten times more CO2 than humans! Good to know we are not the worst offenders in setting our atmosphere on fire.

(Phys.org) – A new genetic analysis revealing the previously unknown biodiversity and distribution of thousands of fungi in North America might also reveal a previously underappreciated
Apparently, fungi emit ten times more CO2 than humans! Good to know we are not the worst offenders in setting our atmosphere on fire.

(Phys.org) – A new genetic analysis revealing the previously unknown biodiversity and distribution of thousands of fungi in North America might also reveal a previously underappreciated contributor to climate change…Pine forests are chock full of wild animals and plant life, but there’s an invisible machine

underground. Huge populations of fungi are churning away in the soil, decomposing organic matter and releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

Despite the vital role these fungi play in ecological systems, their identities have only now been revealed. A Stanford-led team of scientists has generated

a genetic map of more than 10,000 species of fungi across North America. The work was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences.

Fungi are much more important than most people realize, said Kabir Peay, an assistant professor of biology at Stanford and senior author on the new paper.

“They are the primary decomposers in most of the planet’s ecosystems,” he said, “and if not for them, dead material would accumulate to the point where most

other biological processes on Earth would grind to a halt.”

Soil fungi can be divided into two primary groups. The saprotrophs live in the top layer of soil, digesting dead matter, breaking up molecules into

individual components – converting proteins into amino acids and starches to simple sugars, and freeing up elements such as nitrogen – that plants rely on

for growth.

The other group, mycorrhizal fungi, have an even closer bond with plants, living among their roots and converting older forms of organic matter into nitrogen

and phosphorus for the plants. In return, the plants feed these fungi a steady stream of sugars they obtain from photosynthesis.

The soil stores three to four times as much carbon as the atmosphere, and all this microorganism activity also releases some of that carbon into the air, to a tune of 10 times the amount of carbon into the atmosphere as humans release through emissions.

“It’s a huge flux of carbon into the atmosphere, and fungi are the engines,” said Jennifer Talbot, a postdoctoral research fellow in Peay’s lab and first author on the study. “But we do not know how much diversity matters in maintaining the carbon cycle. Are all fungi doing the same thing? Can you kill half the species on Earth and still have the same amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, carbon stored on land and nutrients recycled?”

Patrice Ayme Very interesting Alexi! I was supposed to run in Point Reyes today, but life intervened… It’s indeed all decomposing out there. OK, well, one ought not to confuse “forcing” and balancing”. It has long been known that emission and uptake of CO2 by nature is about ten times human emissions. But that’s not the point: most human GHG is from fossils, so are new in the system: they FORCE it. Moreover, the natural system is collapsing: look at dissolving phytoplankton. So it can’t absorb what it used to, looking forward.

[…] Abstract: The mathematics of “Climate Change” are much more problematic than the IPCC makes it sound. The IPCC ignores most of the CO2 injected in the biosphere from human activity (!), and the fact that, although the main trigger, atmospheric CO2 is not the main agent of climate change, or, more generally biosphere change (a better concept). Integrating all agents of change, direct or indirect gives ten years to catastrophe (this here is the technical justification of my essay “Terminal Greenhouse Crisis“). […]

The energy from the wind and sun cannot be stored except with dams at proximity. For wind offshore, elevated lagoons, for a few billion each, could be built. However that’s of dubious feasibility, both technologically and economically.

Batteries cannot work: there is plainly not enough lithium, and batteries are too inefficient.

What’s left? Hydrogen. Water can be broken by electricity, the hydrogen can be stored rather easily, transported, and even be put in cars (to be converted back in electricity by highly efficient fuel cells).

Want to know what is even worse than that? Fracking companies use leakage from transnational pipelines to make themselves look better: Citing geology Professor Peter Styles, they point out that 1.5% of gas transported long distances is lost to the atmosphere. This may not sound like much but, when you factor in the long-term warming potential of methane (not just its short-term effects), this leakage has the same warming potential as all of the transported gas that does eventually get burned.http://www.cuadrillaresources.com/news/industry-news/article/we-probably-need-shale-gas/

Dear Martin: Indeed.
Thanks for the link, I never get enough of these.
The present USA plutocracy’s motto is the same as Louis’ XV: “After us, the flood!”
Except in the meantime, it’s literal, and they are getting the tornadoes. Another 20 dead or maybe more, over the weekend (in spite of better, safer construction). But the fossil burners don’t care, as long as they end up on top, and lots of OTHER people suffer.
PA

Comments such as mine often get a “so what should we do?” response. The trouble is, although there are solutions, unless or until our politicians stop believing and repeating industrial propaganda, there will exist neither the popular demand nor the political will necessary to get them implemented.

That being the case, as a result of a toxic mix of arrogance greed and stupidity, it is hard to see how humanity can now avoid the consequences of exceeding the ecological carrying capacity of the planet. As such:
– the best we can hope for is ecological scarcity; and
– the worst is environmental collapse.
To be honest, neither sounds very pleasant.

Dear Martin: It’s fully clear to me that we are risking the ultimate: HYPOXIA.
By injecting huge quantities of CO2 suddenly in the ocean, we threaten to SHOCK it, just as a swimming pool, and kill too much of the phytoplankton. That, more than anything else, is the major danger.
Maybe I should write a short essay on that.
PA

Martin: Thanks for the compliment, Martin! Yes, short essays have been asked for. The problem is then that one tends to repeat oneself like a broken record. I mean I can say 500 times I have an argument for the extinction of Neanderthal traits… But at some point I need to roll out the reasoning in full:https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/why-did-neanderthals-disappear/

[Although some would whine I did not write all the equations… But often “equations” are equation fluff… Hiding the main idea, or lack thereof…]

As far as having the time, I progressively organized my life that way, long long ago. I do not have teaching duties for ensuring my daily bread, for example. Not anymore (I taught in a few well known universities, one of them being plutocratic central). It was not really a plan. Simply, in top universities, hazardous thoughts are not welcome. The more I developed the later, the less welcome I was, and the less intelligent debates I could have.

For example, I contested the usual wisdom on Black Holes. At the time, in Stanford, it was poorly received. Now, having changed centuries, it’s (nearly) standard wisdom… Or at least Hawking says something similar to what I used to say. That reminds me I better put out my “Holonomic Time” objection to the Big Bang (it also works for Black Holes).

You know, Socrates did not even bother to write. Reason? All these things take time. Reason can go 24/7/365, but no more… Anyway, I appreciate YOUR work a lot… But, as Sartre insisted a lot (he was in good position to appreciate that, considering his life), BAD FAITH is a strong motivation. Climate deniers have bad faith. They are actually pollution deniers. So correct reason slips on them like water on ducks.
PA

You are far too kind, Patrice. I am merely a PhD candidate – an intellectual minow compared to you. However, your final comments are reminiscent of Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s “Betrayal of Science and Reason’ (1996) or the more recent ‘World on the Edge’ by Lester Brown.

What we are risking now is to just being spared to be steamed alive, only because we would have run out of oxygen first. I don’t know if Putin will succeed in his attempt to make a World War III now, but there certainly will be one about fossil fuels pretty soon, when the extent of the catastrophe becomes clear.

One point: those most anxious to become political leaders are typically the most psychopathic. Thus it’s only natural that the elected oligarchy turns itself towards Satanism (for want of a better word), plutocracy.
PA

[Sent to Mashable, which asks for personal iformation, and then did not published it, apparently.]

Another problem is that the CO2 is being discharged very fast in the atmosphere, and half of it is thus converted in carbonic acid in the oceans. Thus the phytoplankton could die, and so would the production of oxygen.

Another point: with the other man made greenhouse gases, we are well above 450ppm, making Antarctica unstable. However the propaganda by those paid by fossil fuels propagandists is overwhelming.

You have seen nothing yet. Change will accelerate, and could become catastrophic overnight, if methane hydrates start to be released catastrophically from the oceans’ bottom (whose temperature has been going up steadily). Methane has more than thirty times the greenhouse effect than CO2, for the same mass.

David Hillman, Illinois
The oceans’ bottom temperatures have not been rising steadily. It takes thousands of years to transfer heat from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. Even if we had turned loose a giant microwave oven on the planet, the laws of thermodynamics say it’d be a long time indeed before the oceans’ depths would notice.

@ David Hillman: Your first sentence is an insult to observation and logic, except if interpreted in the shallowest way possible.

It is true that the oceans’ caloric capacity is hundreds of times that of atmosphere. However, your speculations are contradicted by observation. The oceans’ temperature, even at the depth of 2,500 meters (a mile and a half) has been rising enormously, and steadily.

Moreover, methane hydrates disintegration has been observed recently, all over. However, because the substance was unknown even recently, there is evidence yet that it has augmented recently. Yet, it is clear that methane eruptions, including consequential tsunamis, are just a matter of time. They did happen during the last de-glaciation, 9,000 years ago, or so.